The product death cycle & it's effect on a startup

Life is tough for startups. Every day can be an existential crisis, every day can be a challenge to find your first set of customers or product market fit.

In this search, Startups spend a lot of time thinking of the one feature which will differentiate them from competition, the feature which will make customers come in running to use their product.

If you already have a few customers using your product and you notice growth stalling the most common solution startups think of is trying to find a new feature which you believe can be the catalyst for growth. Makes sense right? If people are not using your product you need to add a feature which will change that.

So you ask your customers what they would like, and decide to build that in. Unfortunately, what this leads to the “Product Death Cycle”, something both Andrew Chen & David J Bland have documented. You should definitely give it a read to figure out the issue with product adoption & feature creep.

If you are early stage startup then you have more challenges:

Sales pitches become complex

Your sales team has to pitch multiple features now. If the new feature is orthogonal to the current set, then they are going to have a tough time trying to figure out which feature to prioritise for each prospect.

Marketing needs to promote more features

Your marketing team now has more keywords to push, more landing pages to manage, generally more work to do.

Support and success are over burdened

The same goes for your Customer Success & Support teams. The team now needs to work to up-sell to current customer without more manpower, that means less success & support

New features = New bugs

As you need to write more code, you will inherently have more bugs, which will take away time from your dev team who now have to resolve those issues.

Multiple backlogs

Product teams now have 2 backlogs to manage. Each feature will need more iterations

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In short it is going to push & stress each of your teams. Which will lead to friction, issues & Arguments and finally attrition.

In an attempt to chase everything, you may end up achieving nothing

Unless you have a lot of money in the bank which can help in hiring, you need to be careful when building new features, especially if they are totally orthogonal.

Republished with permission

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